“It’s beyond language.” So speaks ex-clergyman Christopher Roulston in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. For McGuinness, the limitations of language are both restriction and liberation, something to be railed against as much as it is to be manipulated.

In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler identifies an unsettling problem at the heart of the idea of feminism. Feminism, she argues, imagines the idea of ‘women’ as a common identity that all women share and that unites them all. But where does our idea of what ‘women’ are come from?

“The house has grown cold, the province has grown lonely…The temple of the Lord is ransacked…Dance in this deserted temple of the Lord.”

As the whistle blew in Thiepval wood at 7:30 am on 1st July 1916, the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division began their march in to no-man’s land under a hail of German bullets. Today, their ghosts are still marching on banners and on gable walls throughout Northern Ireland.

2016 has been a year of what feels like almost constant commemoration in Ireland as the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916 is marked in lectures, art exhibitions, television programmes and parades. But we are also in the middle of commemorating the Great War, a war that for a very long time in post-independence Ireland, was a subject of embarrassment rather than remembrance in what the historian R. F. Foster calls “a policy of intentional amnesia”.

The American industrialist Henry Ford is famous for inventing the Model T Ford, the world’s first affordable mass produced car. The Model T Ford was not Henry Ford’s most astonishing invention.

In 1914, Ford shocked the world by announcing that he was raising the rate of pay in his plants to $5 an hour. This more than doubled his workers’ wages. At the same time, Ford decided to limit the number of hours that his workers were allowed to work. Initially, he limited his workers to six eight hour shifts from Monday to Saturday, which he further reduced in 1926 to five eight hour shifts from Monday to Friday. In doing so, Ford invented both the modern conception of the working week and the idea of leisure time.

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things is an unusual play because we see the events of the story subjectively, though the eyes of its main character, Emma. We experience the world as she experiences it. When Emma takes drugs, the lights glow brighter and voices slow down. People seem to become other people. Objects disappear and reappear unexpectedly. When her experience of events becomes fragmented, the action of the play becomes fragmented. We see her world from the inside, as opposed to seeing the reality of the events that she is experiencing from the outside.

How is technology changing the way that we stage and design a production? What new possibilities might digital technology open up for theatre designers in the future?

From the Deus Ex Machina of Ancient Greek Theatre to the invention of the electric lantern in the late nineteenth century, technology has had a huge impact on the ways in which we stage a performance. Olivier Award Winning Set Designer Es Devlin (Chimerica, American Psycho, The Nether) and Luke Halls (I Can’t Sing!, Olympic and Paralympic Closing Ceremonies) discuss how digital technology is currently revolutionising the world of theatre design.